Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

34 States Fund ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’

As more and more evidence comes to light showing that Crisis Pregnancy Centers routinely lie to women who go to them, NARAL reports that 34 states fund those centers in one way or another. Some do so directly, others do it with specialty license plates, while some also require women to visit them before they can have an abortion. Here’s a map of those states:

If CPCs receive funding through the sale of specialty license plates, that’s no big deal — as long as the state allows all groups to sell such plates. But the fact that they lie to women, telling them that abortion causes breast cancer and that condoms don’t help prevent STDs, among other things, is a real problem. As NARAL says, “These lies are designed to scare women out of choosing abortion care. When a woman doesn’t have honest information about her options, it could endanger her reproductive health.”

What makes it so hard for me to take the Anti-Choice crowd seriously is that they really aren’t anti-abortion. They generally tend to fall into one of two categories.

1) Hateful misogynists who feel that god has given them a special mission to punish any woman who has sex for any reason other than to be a baby factory for the man who rules over here.

2) Naive idiots who feel that wishful thinking, lies and intimidation is a good way to prevent abortions.

The really sad part about the second group is that they genuinely want to reduce the number of abortions which is something that I actually support, but they completely ignore the methods that reliably and demonstrably reduce the number of abortions, methods like comprehensive sex ed, low cost or free access to birth control and just generally being open and honest about where babies come from.

These people are either assholes or idiots. In either case, we need to make sure that they don’t win.

If CPCs receive funding through the sale of specialty license plates, that’s no big deal — as long as the state allows all groups to sell such plates.

Yes, actually it IS a big deal. If a state funds any activity through a system of private voluntary contrubution, then there’s a strong chance that the activity will be heavily influenced, if not controlled, by the interests of the people making the contributions, not by those of the general public. There’s a very serious conflict of interest here, between taxpayers in general and a smaller interest group with its own source of funds.

If the teatards and misogynists want to fund their paid liars through voluntary contributions or sales of anything, they can do it without having their activities legitimized by state participation.

I’m really surprised Massachusetts is one of those states, I lived there for my whole life up until a few months ago and the opposition to sex ed and abortion was pretty minimal. It still existed but it was mostly the diehard Catholics and their numbers are dwindling.